Why I Believed: Reflections of a Former Missionary

by Kenneth W. Daniels

In a prior language survey class, I had learned of dialect chains where speakers of dialect A could understand speakers of neighboring dialect B; dialect B was mutually intelligible with dialect C; C with D; and so forth to F; but speakers of A could not understand speakers of F. So how many languages are there, and which dialect should be the target of a new Bible translation? I had no trouble believing that language dialects evolved from a parent stock, so it seemed that something comparable could have happened with biological species, which disturbed my notion of the fixity of species. I realize that many creationists accept limited evolution even outside the species level, but for some reason I was shaken by the parallels between linguistic and biological evolution, to the point that I began to suspect evolution might be true. Almost out of the blue,

divorce [Deuteronomy 22:19, 29; Ezra 10:2-3; Malachi 2:16; Mark 10:11-12],

C. Stephen Evans' Philosophy of Religion, Donald Bloesh's Holy Scripture, Larry Richards' 735 Baffling Bible Questions Answered, Helmut Thielicke's The Evangelical Faith, Waldemar Janzen's Old Testament Ethics, John Barton's Ethics and the Old Testament, Willard Swartley's Slavery, Sabbath, War & Women, and Cyrus Gordon and Gary Rendsburg's The Bible and the Ancient Near East.

In 2 Samuel 21:19 it is the hero Elhanan who slays Goliath at the town of Gob.

1 Chronicles 20:5 makes Elhanan the killer of Goliath's brother.

Letters from a Skeptic, by Greg Boyd,

Roger Fout's Next of Kin: My Conversations with Chimpanzees (Fouts 1997), which surprised me with the many cognitive similarities between chimps and humans; and Ed Babinski's Leaving the Fold: Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists (Babinski

According to Hebrews 10:26-27, the penalty for rejecting Christ after having followed him is divine judgment with no further hope for redemption,

African Americans—or, as John Howard Griffin did, turn my skin black and see how others treat me (Griffin 1961).

The American Heretic's Dictionary:

Roman Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara from Brazil: "When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint; when I asked why there were so many poor, they called me a communist" (Borg 2003, 201).

"You will never know that you are dead, so, as far as you're concerned you will always be alive" (Hecht 2007).

Thomas Paine's treatise, An Examination of the Passages in the New Testament, Quoted from the Old, and Called Prophecies of the Coming of Jesus Christ (Paine 1807).

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